I sometimes think that the things in my head that don’t want to come out are the most dangerous. Things that stay lurking in musty corners of my mind for years. Sometimes decades. That can’t be good, right? God only knows what twisted mutations happen in the darkest corners of a troubled mind.

This thought, the one I’m chasing with you now, is a real crafty old bugger. One minute it’s a ghost then a lie then a fantasy. It’s there though – I can see the empty spaces that it leaves in the process of its concealment. I can notice the missing joy and peace and energy that it uses to power its invisibility motors.

Can one catch a thought with a thought? Perhaps I’m being too ambitious – maybe I should just throw likely words in the general direction of the gaps in my mind and see what sticks? Words like shame and guilt and waste and ….. denial.

Fuck I just saw the ghost of my mother. The hole in my mind, the hole in my soul, is in the shape of my mother. My mother is ancient. Older than anyone should be made to be. She’s been that way since I’ve known her. There’s always been a feeling of primal misery and decay about her. It was once covered in young fresh skin and now it’s covered in sagging wrinkled tissue thin skin. There’s something frighteningly timeless, almost vital, about her decrepitude. An endless fuck you in the face of innocence, beauty, youth and joy.

An endless capacity for incapacity – a problem for every solution. That’s me old mum for you. Even the best of her days are endless, horrid and grey.

What’s that? Why does this bother me so? It’s hardly my fault is it? Just ignore her and she’ll go away. But don’t you know the saddest ghosts live the longest.

I left my job in the city to engage in a spot of ghostbusting. Just in case it would help the endless proliferation of symptoms. Help fight the anxiety, the despair, the addiction, confusion, anger, lostness, lack. Told myself, wouldn’t it be nice to spend some quality time with mum while she’s still healthy enough to hang with. Go for walks, have some lovely little chats.

Fuck. Was my capacity for self deceit so strong? Now there are two sources of endless darkness in my life. My mother and my mother’s ghost. The Mother, the Son and the Unholy ghost. What a clusterfuck.

Well I can’t rightly leave us here in this mess. It’s not a fertile mess – just a merry bit of madness. And, believe me I’ve tried, there’s nothing to be done with the woman herself. She’s oblivious. Her misery and darkness impenetrable.

All I can do is align myself with lighter beings, brighter beings. Be a lighter and brighter being myself. Be a channel for the light and love of god or, if the g-word offends, of the Universal Mind. No good carrying candles into a black hole. I’ve spent my life smashing my serenity – bouncing against the implacable event horizon of mother’s misery.

I’ve been wanting to have a drink today. No problem you say, what’s your poison? Oh I’m not fussy really, a Black Label or a Castle. Or an Amstel. And a pill or two. Just a few milligrams. Of codeine or diazapam or, for good measure both. Well that can’t be hard. Certainly not the codeine bit – what about an adcodol or myprodol? I suppose I could rustle up a valium or ativan too at a pinch.

Of course you know I can’t. In fact even, my imaginary sponsor might say, thinking about it too much is not a good idea. Because it’s never just one or two is it? Well, that’s not exactly true. Two or three beers at most and two adcodol and I’ll be fine. I’ll be able to write, do some art, read a bit then, later, sleep like a baby. I’ll probably even have those really vivid dreams just like I used to. Perhaps the ones where I flap my arms and start to fly.

On my way home I was trying to hold some quite delicate thoughts and emotions in my brain. So I could sit here and download them onto my laptop. Capture them, without killing them, for the sake of science. But I think they seeped out into the general noise and dirt of late evening ennui.

You asked if I were trying to protect you and I think I said that to protect our fragile intersubjective space I would have to protect you too. That to protect our relationship we have to protect ourselves and eachother. Because things are so much easier to break than they are to put back together. Said that the ephemeral things, the fragile things need to be protected the most. Even though the armies of chaos will win the war there is some dignity in the battle for coherence, for innocence. For beauty.

Perhaps I have become just a bit depressed. A bit oppressed by thoughts of cold dirty puddles, rusty benches, cancer growing quietly in a million oblivious bodies. And I’m seeing some really sad aspects of us. Of this space. This process. And I know you want to go there with me but I don’t want to infect the fragile infant space that we share. Because I have gone down that route and it never turns out well.

People are not drugs. Even though loneliness is the disease, company is not the cure. My loneliness could eat a fair sized stadium of bright and innocent well wishers and still wonder about what to choose for the main course. I can’t feel the heat and the light of your sun if I let the darkness out. If I let you in.

I have my imaginary sponsor to deal with that shit. He says sit with the feeling. So I’m sitting with it. And writing about it. And waiting for the cold tide of terror to ebb. Waiting for my little spot in the sun to come back so I can breathe a bit easier and do my bit to be a source of good instead of an ambassador of pain and decay.